Payoff for the Banker

by Frances

  The girl told him he would get over it. She said he would obviously have to get over it.

  “All right,” he said. “I let you down. Then I let Jameson down.” He laughed shortly. “Let him down hard,” he added.

  She did not say anything. She looked at nothing across the pool.

  “My father,” he said after a pause, and now his tone was carefully conversational, “had a lot to answer for.”

  “Well,” she said. “He answered for it. The hard way.”

  Josh said he didn’t know. He said there were harder ways. A good many harder ways.

  “All right, Josh,” she said. “All right.”

  “He kicked us around,” Josh said. “Probably he enjoyed it. What do you think?”

  She said she didn’t know.

  “I think he had it coming,” Josh Merle said. “Looking at it abstractly, as if he weren’t my father.”

  “Josh,” she said. “You talk like—” She broke off. She came up in her chair and balanced in it, leaning forward, elbows on knees. She looked at the ground and after a moment she said, “Listen, Josh.”

  “Listen,” she said, “There’s something the matter with you. I don’t know what—maybe it’s conscience. You brood over things—over us, over your father, even over Jamie. Over being—hurt.”

  “Crippled,” Josh said, as if he were supplying quite casually, a missing word. “Lame. Limpy.”

  “Over being lame,” she said. “Call it anything you want to. It’s an incident. I’m an incident. Even your father is an incident. Heaven knows, Jamie is an incident.”

  “Murder is a pretty big incident,” Josh Merle said. “Crippling your best friend and changing his whole life is a pretty big incident. You—you were a very big incident. I think incident is a hell of a funny word.”

  “Look,” she said. “You can turn a page—read another chapter. Put on another reel of film. You can do that.”

  “Can you?” he said.

  She twisted her body to look at him. Her bra and shorts were white against her skin. In the dusk, they seemed to have a glow of their own, and her eyes seemed to have a different glow.

  “Why not?” she said. “I did.”

  “Without any trouble?”

  “Well,” she said, “I did it. Everything’s some trouble.”

  He looked at her and said that some things wouldn’t be. She looked back at him and did not pretend not to understand, and shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “this is a new reel. This is another page.”

  “Is it?” he said. “What makes you so sure?”

  He did not move toward her. But it was as if he had moved.

  She leaned back suddenly in the chair. It was as if there had been the strand of a spider’s silk between them, and her movement had broken it. Words were inessential, but there were words.

  “Because that was yesterday,” she said. “That was a long time ago. That was when you didn’t come and get me, Josh. That was when you believed—when you were a good boy and believed what papa told you. Don’t you remember?”

  He did not answer for a moment, and then he stood up before he answered. He stood over her and looked down at her and the tension between them was of a new and different kind. Looking up at him, the girl’s eyes widened slowly and she started up.

  “No,” he said. “If I were you, my dear—”

  Then he broke off suddenly and turned toward a figure which came toward them.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. “Hello, Stan. Looking for Ann?”

  “I,” Goode said, “am almost always looking for Ann, aren’t I? Is she down here? Mrs. North thought she was.”

  “No,” Josh Merle said. There was no tension now. He spoke easily, carelessly. “Anyway, I haven’t seen her. Have you, Mary?”

  “No,” the girl said. “Why don’t you sit down somewhere, Mr. Goode? Maybe she’s around somewhere.”

  “Why not?” Stanley Goode said. He sat down on the grass by Mary’s chair. He looked up at Josh. “Unless, of course,” he said, “this is a private fight.”

  Josh laughed. He said it wasn’t a fight. He said he was going to change and have a swim. He walked toward the bathhouse along the concrete edging of the pool. His footsteps were irregular as he walked, and in the gathering darkness his movements were faintly irregular as he limped.

  The change in Pamela North was amazing. Hurrying along behind her, Jerry thought that never—not even in her—had he seen so remarkable a change so quickly made. A few minutes ago she had been deep in a lassitude which could hardly—if, Jerry thought, at all—be distinguished from sleep. Now she was—well, now she was very difficult to keep up with, particularly as it was now quite quickly growing dark. Jerry hurried across the lawn and across the flagged terrace and they burst, it seemed to him, into the living room.

  Laurel Burke was deep in a chair; enfolded in a chair. She held a cigarette as if holding a cigarette were an effort; looking at them, she lifted a glass and drank and put it down with a gesture which seemed to assure them that there was a duty, discharged against obstacles. Pam North stopped and it seemed to Jerry that she almost skidded. She looked at Laurel Burke and then she looked around the room. She came back to Laurel Burke.

  “Where,” Pam said, and her voice was hurried, “where is everybody?”

  Laurel Burke was languid.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m here.”

  Pam’s tone dismissed that.

  “Everybody else,” she said. “Bill Weigand? Sergeant Mullins? That State policeman—what’s his name?”

  “Sullivan,” Laurel told her. “He’s good-looking. They all went.”

  Pam looked at her and shook her head.

  “They couldn’t have gone,” she said. “They couldn’t!”

  “I don’t know why not,” Laurel said. “Anyway, they did. They told the old girl—Mrs. Burnside or whatever it is—that there was nothing more they could do here tonight and that they were going. And they went.”

  “No,” Pam said. “I don’t believe they went.”

  It was, Laurel Burke assured her, all the same to Laurel Burke. Maybe they hadn’t gone; maybe Mrs. Burnside—

  “Burnwood,” Jerry said. “Burnwood.”

  Maybe the old girl made it up; she didn’t know the old girl; maybe the old girl did make things up. Maybe Jamie made it up.

  “Jameson told you?” Jerry said. It was queer; he agreed with Pam that it was queer.

  “Jamie,” Laurel said. “Good old Jamie. He told me.”

  Laurel Burke had, Jerry decided, had a good deal to drink. The fact that she had had a good deal to drink grew on you. Apparently it grew on Pam, because now she turned and walked away. As Jerry watched her she made a quick circuit of the living room. She found it empty, save for Miss Burke. She started out a door and changed her mind.

  “Outside somewhere,” she said. “Jerry! Come on. We’ve got to find Bill!”

  The Norths went out the way they had come and Laurel’s voice, deep as cotton velvet, followed them. “—back to New York,” she said. “And I’ve got to stay here.”

  In spite of himself, Jerry paused; in spite of himself he turned a little and said, “Why?”

  “I,” Laurel said, with dignity, “have got to mind the baby.”

  Jerry was sure afterward that he wasted only a moment considering this, but when he followed Pam onto the terrace it was no longer clear that he was following Pam. At any rate, Pam had disappeared. He started to call her and then decided not to call her. There was something breathless in this sudden darkness; something secret. Pam’s urgency communicated itself to Jerry. The thing to do was to find Bill Weigand, or at any rate Sergeant Mullins. Because surely the Burke girl had misunderstood; surely they were still somewhere at Elmcroft.

  Around the corner of the house, where Pam thought she had detected movement—toward which, sure that Jerry was behind her, she had gone at a run—Pam found nobody. But surely there had been somebody there; somebody he
ading toward—toward the path leading down to the beach and the beach cottage. Pam started toward the path, still almost running. She ran headlong into a very thick and prickly bush. The bush swayed slightly and Pam North bounced.

  That wouldn’t do. She would have to have a light. She would have to get a light from the house and go down—she started back around the corner of the house, still moving rapidly. She collided with something, but this was not a bush. This gave and made a surprised sound.

  “Really, Mrs. North!” a startled, and slightly breathless, voice said. “Really!”

  “I’m sorry,” Pam said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Burnwood. How did you know it was me?”

  “I see very well in the dark,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “Also I have been outside for some time and my eyes have grown accustomed to it.” She paused, reflectively. “It seems to me, my dear, that you are behaving very oddly,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “Or do you always?”

  “Always,” Pam told her, to end discussion. “Have you seen Lieutenant Weigand? Or Mullins, the sergeant?”

  “But my dear Mrs. North,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “They all went back to town. Almost an hour ago.” She paused again and patted herself, rearranging not evident disarray caused by collision. “I assumed, Mrs. North, that you and Mr. North had gone also,” she said.

  Mrs. Burnwood’s voice implied that this had been, on the whole, a pleasant assumption.

  “No,” Pam said. “We’re still here. So is Miss Burke.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Burnwood said. She sighed deeply. “So is Miss Burke.” She sighed again, even more deeply.

  “Well,” Pam said, “excuse me. I’ve got to find the lieutenant. I’m sure he can’t have gone.”

  “Really,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “Really! He and the other policemen certainly drove off in a car. Of course if you don’t—.”

  “All right,” Pam said. “All right. Then they came back. Goodbye!”

  She went off, along the terrace. It was strange what had happened to Jerry.

  There were voices in the living room and she went in toward the voices and the light.

  “It’s not going to do you any good,” Ann Merle said to Laurel Burke. Ann stood looking down at the other girl. Ann’s voice was not angry; it was merely indescribably distant and cold.

  “I think it is,” Laurel said. “I really think it is.”

  She seemed rather amused. She sipped her drink.

  “I think,” she said, “that I will really learn to like scotch—now. Now that I can afford such good scotch.”

  Pam’s heels clicked on the polished floor. They both looked at her.

  “He’s not here,” Laurel Burke said. “I told you that. He went back to town. For God’s sake.” She looked at Ann Merle. “You tell her,” she said. “Tell her that the cops have gone. Back to copping.”

  She laughed; her laughter giggled.

  “Yes,” Ann said. “They have gone, Mrs. North—Lieutenant Weigand and the others. Didn’t you know?”

  “They can’t—” Pam began and gave it up. “All right,” she said. “They’ve gone. But I’ve got to find somebody. Where’s—where’s your brother, Miss Merle?”

  Really, Ann Merle told her, she didn’t know. Down by the pool? Out on the lawn—or the terrace? With Jamie? Or with Mary Hunter?

  “You don’t,” Pam said, “know where anybody is? Not anybody?”

  Ann Merle shook her head. She gestured vaguely. Everybody was—around.

  There was no help there. Desperately, standing again on the terrace, Pam needed help. She needed Jerry—Bill—somebody certain and assured; somebody who would know what to do.

  Because what she had done had been wrong; desperately wrong. That was clear now—that was very clear. From the beginning she had been wrong—wrong in theory and so wrong in action; dangerously wrong in action—perhaps fatally wrong in action. And now that she knew, there was nobody to turn to—nobody to help her undo what she had done. And it had to be undone.

  Pam could not stand and look wildly into the darkness. The urgency which drove her drove her to action—to almost any action. There were people she had to find and the directions of search were almost infinite. But if she stood still, failure was final, inevitable. Now any action was better than none.

  Pam, not running now—feeling her way—listening—went across the terrace, on which her heels no longer clicked. She went onto the lawn and headed away from the house.

  “Here,” Jerry said, and he was whispering. “Somewhere along here. But I don’t know which way she went. I thought I saw something moving over there, but it was Mrs. Burnwood. Then I went—.”

  “All right,” Bill Weigand said. He was whispering, too. “She’s somewhere around—in the dark. She’s all right this time, Jerry. I wish one or two others were as—but don’t worry about her.” He fell silent, but his fingers were on Jerry’s arm. That was the way they had met, on the far side of the house when Jerry circled it searching for Pam. Out of the darkness, Bill Weigand’s hand had closed on Jerry’s arm and at the same time Bill had said, softly but with careful clearness, “It’s me, Jerry. Bill. Don’t talk.”

  They had not talked, but they had whispered enough—Bill speaking for Mullins and Sullivan, merely darker patches in the darkness. They had driven away. A mile from the house they had driven into a field. They had walked back only when it was dark, coming over the rise on which the house stood. It had taken a long time to get dark.

  “The old game,” Bill whispered. “Let them think it’s a set-up. Walk in on them. Catch them at it.”

  “At murder?” Jerry said.

  Bill Weigand hoped not. But if it were, it wouldn’t come off. He spoke with assurance.

  “It sure as hell better not come off,” Sullivan said, out of the darkness.

  “It won’t,” Bill said. His voice sounded confident. But Jerry, who knew it, had heard it sound more confident. “After all,” he said, “it isn’t as if we didn’t know—it isn’t—.”

  He broke off, listening. They all listened, in the quiet night. But now the night was completely quiet.

  “The pool, I think,” Bill said. “Somebody splashed—dived, probably. That’s the likeliest, anyway. We’ll take—.” He broke off again and started afresh. “Jerry,” he said, “you and I will take a look at the pool. Captain—suppose you have a look at the beach cottage. Mullins—see if you can get in the house and have a look. You know who you’re looking for.”

  “Yeah,” Mullins said. “O.K., Loot.” He considered. “It don’t look to me like we got so much,” he said. Thereupon he vanished. After a moment, the solidified darkness which had been Captain Sullivan was also the more rarefied darkness which was merely night. Jerry and Bill Weigand left the terrace where they had been standing and started across the grass.

  There was no use in pretending that Stanley Goode was an ideal companion for a girl in a sketchy bathing suit, reclining deep in a deck chair with the night warm all around and fragrant. Mr. Goode was not, at any rate, the ideal companion for Mary Hunter. He was polite, but he was abstracted. No, he hadn’t been playing much tennis lately. Yes, he thought he would play a bit later. No, it didn’t look like much of a season with so many men in the service. Yes, he—

  He stood up.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hunter,” he said. “I’ve got to find Ann. If you’ll excuse me?”

  Whether she would or not—before she had had a chance to—he was gone. He swung off to the left, circling toward the house—hoping, it was clear, to find Ann Merle in some place they knew of; eager to find her anywhere. Mary leaned back and drew the coat around her and looked at nothing across the pool. In a moment, Josh Merle’s long body would arch into the pool, diving as he had dived so often during those few weeks of another summer, cutting the water as he had cut it then.

  She did not, she told herself, want to see Josh Merle do remembered things, because it brought back the memory of other things—of the failure of his trust in her, of the long, long weeks she had
waited for him to come, of the deep hurt. Those things came back too clearly; they seemed to wipe out the interval between—the interval which Rick had made bright. The sight of Josh Merle arching into the pool would bring back memories older than any of her memories of Rick. And that realization was a slow, frightening pain.

  She did not go and escape the memories she feared. She waited, knowing that to see Josh again would hurt, and not being able to move to avert the hurt. She thought of ordinary things—of Stanley Goode and his patient, probably futile, devotion to Ann Merle; of the Norths, who had brought her to Elmcroft for reasons which were not clear at first and had since grown less clear; of the long time it was taking Josh to change and dive. And then she thought, with an odd kind of alarm, of Josh’s face and his words the moment before Stanley Goode had come and broken the spell between them. There had been a new force in Josh Merle at that moment; a force which was not part of her memories of the summer—a force that might change a great many things; a force which was curiously frightening.

  And then, very surprisingly, she heard his steps coming back, and knew them by the slight irregularity, the faint impediment, which now, she found, was a new way he had of hurting her. Because he had been hurt—

  She did not look up when he came up beside her chair. She said: “Did you give the idea up?”

  “What idea, Mrs. Hunter?” he said. “I seldom give up an idea, once I have it.”

  At the voice she turned quickly and said, “Oh.”

  “I thought—” she said. “I thought you were—.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course. I suppose we—walk alike. Now. I don’t know where Josh is. I suppose he went back to the house. I saw him going that way, as a matter of fact.”

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Jameson,” she said. “He went to change. He was going to have a swim.”

  “Well,” Jameson said, “he went up to the house. I guess he changed his mind. Josh changes his mind easily, you know.”

  “Does he?” the girl said. “I don’t know him very well—now.”

  “Don’t you?” Jameson said. “I thought you did. Because, you see—he’s still in love with you. I thought you knew that.”